I can easily generate a Man City fan's revulsion about Sir Alex Ferguson's surly shtick, strategic trickery, his bloody, battering success. I can also admit that his contribution to the continuing reinvention of the idea of Manchester is significant.

It's not merely his record as a football manager comprehensively elevating the sporting and commercial legend of Manchester United, but how he has achieved this by enhancing the distinction and confidence of the city even as the club itself has a dubious, monolithic quality, non-local players, and groupie fans scattered everywhere.

As a City fan since 1965, just before they launched one of their occasional, blessed recoveries, to me United represent the dark side – in Game of Thrones terms, more Lannister than Stark – but this contributes to the pizzazz of the city. The inner tension is a central part of its dynamic and historical continuity.

Ferguson's absolutist, warrior-like leadership of United has helped the word Manchester to mean something modern and vital around the world wherever football shirts are sold and worn. It is constantly talked about and means something if only because of United's shrewdly engineered theatrical glamour, but then also City, insolent underdogs goaded into eventual sophisticated revolt by Ferguson's supremacy, now dangerously, infuriatingly loaded with their own schemes and resources; and also Joy Division, the Fall, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, and so on, all of which happened because the Sex Pistols visited a few times in 1976, 10 years after Bob Dylan passed through, accused of being a Judas, although he didn't believe it, two years after his first TV appearance in the UK in Didsbury, around the corner from where Top of the Pops was originally based. It all happened, and happens, in the one place which happens to be known as Manchester.

Ferguson invented a United, refining and redefining previous editions in his own fiercely ambitious image, and that is very Manchester, the city of invention, self-invention, reinvention. It must always be invented so that it does not shrink from view, or get turned into a gutted plaything, a cliched provincial setting mostly controlled from the still ignorant, indifferent south.

Ferguson's role in inventing this molten, international Manchester is as significant as any singer, comedian, scientist, designer, politician, actor, writer or broadcaster, as any of those thriving – or just surviving – locals no-one knows who make their minds up what the city is, and therefore make up what the city is.

Some people leave Manchester and add to its reputation and power while operating elsewhere, connecting it to the rest of the world. Some stay, and make a difference, even if they just keep things as they are. Then there are those from other places, passing through or sticking around, adding to the city's preserved mongrel intensity.

Some arrive because of the great education establishments strewn around Oxford Road and Fallowfield which to some extent maintained the city's status during troubled times. Others come because of the football, the ultimate distillation of the local competitive attitude that once led to such changes in the landscape and population. In the United sense, Busby, Best, Law and Charlton, Ferguson, Cantona, Beckham and Ronaldo. In the City sense, Mercer and Allison of the glorious late 1960s revival, with their commitment to a cause, and now Roberto Mancini and Mansour bin Zayed bin al-Nahyan, deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, and a pouring of money into a dream, into enduring defiance, a beautiful winding-up of Ferguson, but also into grounded structural and environmental reality.

A city that always attracts those on a mission to build, invent, and in a manner conquer, remains a great city, made up by great minds where great minds find they can flourish.

Those who come from outside, bringing their own energy, influence and ambition into Manchester, have always been as important in the construction and modification of its history and image as those born and bred from within. The city is formed by a succession of those restless pursuers of greatness, sure of their own minds, who use its fluid historical momentum and the revolutionary intention lingering in the atmosphere to establish their own position and personality.

The city relishes – and naturally scorns if the integrity seems suspect – crusading showmanship, big-mouthed self-belief and a gutsy, confrontational smartness. It considers arrogance a key component in its make-up, and trusts the single-minded, as long as they conform to specific local desires. City's Mancini, following a series of nervy, half-hearted predecessors less suited to the strange, monumental and messy task of creating a football team in opposition to the extortionate Reds, and remaking history – which Ferguson understood with his own particular combative cunning – has this purpose too, this instinctive perception of how to succeed by channelling uptight regional mentality as well as introducing fresh, resourceful outside skills. He reconfigures local spirit which now includes Ferguson's imported ruthlessness, scheming tenacity and authoritarian superiority, and absorbs and embellishes what there already is.

Ferguson becomes part of a list of those from elsewhere who added to the collective invention of the city, which celebrates the big personality, however flawed, even unstable.

It's a list of outsiders, some of who become insiders, that takes in thinkers and activists such as Engels and Cobden, visionary scientists such as Rutherford and Turing, displaced 1950s West Indian immigrants, the rampaging, inspiring Pistols, the pioneering, proudly local Granada TV (planned by Bernstein of Ilford, Essex) and those who came to set up railways, newspapers, the trade unions, the football league, the rugby league. Manchester exists also because there are those who will go on and on about this being where modern independent thinking began, and maintains itself whatever the circumstances.

New United manager David Moyes comes not just to a football club, to the branded Theatre of Dreams, and a volatile dressing room packed with egos, divas and tweeters, into a carefully curated legacy made up of ghosts, tragedy and triumph, into a dense tangle of speculation and expectation nurtured by a media craving fiasco as much as glory, to a complex, neutralised sporting business relying on victory, trophies and shirt shifting to maintain its stock market value – he comes to the invented, gifted realm of Manchester.

Those who fail when managing United (or City) perhaps do so because, unlike Ferguson – and before him Matt Busby – they lack a visceral conceptual understanding that Manchester United is not only about football and it is not really of Manchester. But it exists because of the history of Manchester, the philosophy, the battling, the myth-making, and Ferguson, above and beyond being a mere crafty, exacting football manager, is a philosopher, historian and fighter.

This gave him the motivational, myth-making skills to liberate suppressed energy, manipulate destiny and make a difference to a city that prides itself on making a difference. An enemy to respect, and to provoke only with considerable care. Will Moyes follow his iron-handed football father by being dispossessed twisted imp, foiled kingslayer or wayward, fractious chip off the old block?